The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for identifying dynamically changing virtual storage devices.
In many computing environments today, the operating system, a hypervisor, or other mechanism is provided to separate a logical representation of storage devices from the actual physical storage devices so as to provide a virtual representation of the storage devices, i.e. virtual storage devices, to the applications running on the computing devices. The virtual storage device is thus, a logical representation of portions of one or more physical storage devices as if these portions together were a single separate physical storage device from the viewpoint of the applications accessing the virtual storage device.
Typically, virtual storage devices are comprised of portions of a plurality of rotating disk storage devices, i.e. hard disk drives (HDDs) comprised of one or more rotating physical disks upon which data is magnetically encoded and read by an arm and sensor assembly. Recently, Solid State Drives (SSDs) devices have been developed and integrated into computing environments. A SSD is data storage device that uses solid state memory, instead of rotating disks, to store persistent data. An SSD emulates a hard disk drive interface and thus, can easily be used in place of hard disk drives in many environments. SSDs typically have a higher access rate than HDDs and thus, can potentially provide greater input/output (I/O) performance over rotating disks of HDDs.